I am an award-winning journalist-broadcaster and best-selling author with a wide range of experience and expertise that touches on many current affairs issues.

Currently based in Cape Town, South Africa, I am particularly strong on Africa and the developing world, ranging from the impact of the 2010 soccer World Cup on South Africa to the minutiae of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

My best-selling first book, Blood River - A Journey To Africa's Broken Heart, touched on the Congo but it also taught me lessons that apply across much of Africa and the developing world.

My new book, due out in September 2010, will be called Chasing The Devil. It will focus on an epic journey I endured through Liberia and Sierra Leone and will it covers both places in great detail, it also touches on the issue of conflict around the world whether in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Born in 1967 I spent almost 20 years on the staff of The Daily Telegraph covering almost all the major conflicts since 1990 including both Gulf Wars (the one in 1991 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003), the Balkan conflicts ( I taught myself enough Albanian to smuggle myself into Kosovo under Serbian occupation in the late 1990s) and the development of al-Qa'eda militancy ( I was the first reporter to get to the site in Yemen of the first killing of westerners by AQ militants in 1998).